D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Bedrockgames]

Why can’t you just say “In a living world sandbox, the setting is the priority, and that’s a good thing”?

Because it wouldn't be honest. The setting isn't the only thing that matters

 

[Campbell]

Because it wouldn't be honest. The setting isn't the only thing that matters

Would it be fair to say as compared to games where we build setting out from the characters that there is more focus on setting and less on characters? Purely in a comparative sense.

 

[zakael19]

We use a lot of Blades tech in my homegroup's other games. Our Vampire hack, our Cyberpunk Cortex hack and our Final Fantasy 8 Cypher hack all have rules for Blades style flashbacks. The FF8 hack uses missions that pretty much work like scores, but are more fleshed out trad style adventures. It also uses downtime actions for pool and wound recovery ebtween missions instead of tracking time.

I’ve even seen some PBTAs bringing downtime actions in to build an episodic structure and create that sort of focused downtempo scenes.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Would it be fair to say as compared to games where we build setting out from the characters that there is more focus on setting and less on characters? Purely in a comparative sense.

I wouldn't say so. I think you are talking about something very different there. I focus almost entirely on characters (both PCs and NPCs). And the prime consideration is agency. I think it is fair to say that some of the games you are talking about explore the inner worlds of characters in a way a trad sandbox probably couldn't without some significant adjustments, and some of those games have the setting shaped more by the players and their conception of the character. That is fair. But a sandbox like the ones we are talking about can be very character focused

I've seen movies for example that took pains to build a world, but that world was in service to the characters. Just because the world isn't malleable to the characters themselves, and has as sense of concreteness, that doesn't mean it isn't about the characters. My campaigns probably feel more like goodfellas than lord of the rings for example. That underworld is very concrete and a lot of the character drama is the characters coming up against the walls of that world

 

[Faolyn]

Back a bunch of pages, I got told in no uncertain terms that one of the strengths of sandbox games is how it can so easily adopt player input. Players want X in the game, it's easy peasy to add it in and not a problem. That was touted as one of the biggest strengths of sandbox play - how adaptable it is.

Yet, here we have a perfect test case - the player chooses "orc" as a favored enemy. Adding orcs into the setting isn't exactly a huge thing. If you goblinoids, orcs aren't really all that different. Yet, what happens in play? The player's choice is completely ignored. Straight up told, "nope".

This is the problem with all this conversation. The massively shifting goalposts any time anyone brings up anything. Sandboxing is apparently the quantum game, capable of being anything at any time to anyone.

OK, you do realize that not every GM runs in exactly the same way, and thus different people are going to give you different responses? You're not getting moving goalposts nearly as often as you think; you just think that everyone who disagrees with you should disagree in the same way.

The world: No orcs.

The player: I want orc as my favored enemy.

GM 1: Nope. Pick something else.

GM 2: OK, there are orcs now. Have fun killing them!

GM 3: There aren't any orcs in this world, but if you want to waste your favored enemy slot on them, go ahead.

GM 4: We've already decided that there are hobgoblins and no orcs, but maybe people use the two names interchangeably. So you can use your favored enemy bonus against hobgoblins.

GM 5: <draws from vague memories of that time they watched Man of La Mancha and decides that the PC thinks that road signs are orcs>

 

[Faolyn]

Sometimes people will be too scared to kill someone, sometimes they won't be.

Hmm. If only there was some way to resolve such uncertainties!

Yeah--letting the players decide what their PCs do.

GMs can roll for their NPCs, if they want to.

 

[zakael19]

I've never heard of a GM running a model. And on its own, imagining isn't modelling.

I mean, the Knights of the Iron Tower - the order to which my PC Thurgon belongs - are obviously copied from/inspired by mediaeval religious military orders. The Lifepath in the BW rulebook is even called Knight of a Holy Military Order. You could even say that they are modelled on the Templars and the like. But their is no modelling of or "simulation of" the Templars, or of anything else.

As best I can tell, the language of simulation/model comes from wargaming. But some wargames do aspire to be simulations, or at least simple models. And they have the correctness conditions that are necessary for something to count as a model or a simulation - for instance, a wargame that models the D-Day landings should, when played and given the appropriate inputs, reliably produce outcomes that reflect what we actually know about how the D-Day landings played out.

But me writing a history into my setting that emulates the D-Day landings isn't running a simulation. It's just writing emulative fiction, the same as Thurgon's military order. The same applies when I write a climate into my setting, or a political geography, or whatever, that emulates how things have turned out on earth.

Another illustration: Graham Greene has a story <spoilers incoming> where early in the events of the novel one of the characters gets very wet in the rain, and then later in the novel she dies of pneumonia. His story isn't a model or a simulation of a disease-process. He just wrote something that seemed plausible, given what English people know sometimes happens to people who get drenched in downpours. An analogous example from RPGing: in one session in my TB2e game, the PCs sold some stirges they had captured to an alchemist. A little while later in the fiction, an event roll gave the result that someone in that town had died. I decided that it was the alchemist, who had become infected and died from handling the stirges. Like Graham Greene, I drew what I took to be a plausible connection between events in the fiction. But it would just be wrong to say that I was modelling or simulating some disease-process.

I don't see the point of this insistence on terminology which obscures rather than clarifies how the decisions are actually being made.

So I think that "having a mental model" is both a) a pretty dang common term and b) not terribly inaccurate for what we're doing when we run a game? Our shared hallucination is all in our heads after all (maybe with a bit of graphical representation). I've used the term quite a bit for how I try and keep a running image in my head of the current game-state + what the characters are doing + how the world is responding before stuff flows forth out of my mouth.

It's not like what I do at work where I'm running a series of actual algorithmic models, but extrapolation of "how x thing may be impact y person in my z town when the players show up" can be tossed under that headliner.

 

[zakael19]

Yeah--letting the players decide what their PCs do.

GMs can roll for their NPCs, if they want to.

We get it, you dont like any game that imposes uncertainty on character internal states. Can we maybe all agree to drop this line? It's not going anywhere, and the length of responses between you and @pemerton gets exhausting .

 

[Faolyn]

Micah said this a few pages back.


A table does not make a decision. A person reading the table does.

If you make a setting with a powerful king as an antagonist, the king is not the causal agent of sending assassins after the PCs. The DM is, even if the DM is using impartial mental heuristic or rolling on a random event table to determine what action within the fiction the king will take.

The GM is acting as the king.

If it had been previously established[1] that the king is the sort who sends assassins after PCs, then the GM is acting as the king would by sending out the assassins. If the king had been previously established to be the sort who sends mind-controlling sorcerers or strongly worded letters, but not assassins, then the GM would not be acting as the king if they sent out assassins. Whether the GM is trying to start a new plot thread (the king is acting out of character) or is being a bad GM has yet to be seen.

This is what some people are missing. The GM isn't just doing things willy-nilly. They're acting as the characters they control are supposed to be acting.

--

[1] By the GM, the players, the writer who first created the king in the sourcebook the GM bought, whoever.

 

[Bedrockgames]

If it's not a model, why does damage go up the farther you fall before landing?

HP is one of those funny ones that can be used in a number of different ways. I think that is why when certain editions did anything that brought these differences into focus, you had more flamewars over them. It can represent meat, some of it certainly does represent meat, but it also represents a host of other things, and I think different groups learned in a more literal interpretation or a less literal interpretation over the years